When my dear coworker Hattie went to report on Phoebe Bridgers’ pop-up concert at Madison Square Garden, she told me she instantly knew which song “was gonna be the damn single.” It was the one that went, “Lost boys/Never grow up, never get old.” I wonder what gave it away. The lonesome trumpet line does immediately recall another Bridgers single, “Kyoto,” from her last album, 2020’s Punisher. And admittedly, that chorus stitched itself to me like my shadow the first time I heard it. Except the words won’t quite stick, so it becomes “Lost boys, la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la.”
Bridgers is a strict adherent to Attenborough’s Law. Even as the cheetah sinks its teeth into the gazelle, or the older rockstar lays a hand on the young girl who idolizes him, she does not interfere. “Lost Boys,” which will appear on an album titled Lost Weekend, toys with her agency as a writer in interesting ways—is the couplet “Lost boys/Find me” a command, or a sigh of resignation?—but lands at the blurry edge of her passive, detached viewfinder. It sounds like a song to be sung back at her. In fairness, when you’re Phoebe Bridgers and can pack MSG, you need a few of those, where you can afford to lose the hard consonants amidst some 20,000-odd voices. Put up against her best work, the lyrical scaffold creaks under the weight of cliché, which may be why Bridgers decided the studio version needed a key change fakeout and a “one-two-three” count-in—so you know the part where you’re supposed to scream. Some songwriters will go their entire careers without landing a bar as ice-cold as “I don’t feel bad, but I’m sorry,” but Bridgers has entire songs full of those. On “Lost Boys,” it’s just the glint of a needle in the hay.
